THE FIRST TWO MONTHS: BETWEEN BRAKE AND ACCELERATOR

The days of a passive presidency belong to a simpler past. Let me be very clear about this: the next President must take an activist view of his office. He must articulate the nation's values, define its goals and marshal its will.

RICHARD NIXON'S campaign definition accurately and eloquently summarizes the leadership that the country expects from its 37th President. In his third month in office, President Nixon is discovering that Candidate Nixon laid down a demanding standard and established a rigorous test for the man who occupies the White House. So far, the most common complaint against him is not so much that he has been wrong, but that he has not been active enough.

This reflects Nixon's deliberate decision to move slowly, steadily and to cool down both the pace and the passions that characterized the last Johnson years. The Nixon Administration has yet to make several score major appointments. Far from "cleaning house in the State Department," as he promised during the campaign, Nixon has made fewer changes than John Kennedy did when he took over from a Republican Administration in 1961. There is no set of proposals that might be labeled the Nixon program. There is as yet no significant departure from Johnson policy in any major area.

The Key Question. Nixon has taken a position on the anti-ballistic missile, but one that does not really settle the issue (see following story). The decision typifies his approach so far--somewhere between action and caution. As for Viet Nam, Nixon has not --so far as the public can see, anyway--moved from the Johnson Administration's policy. Casualties still run as high as 300 or 400 a week. Since peace talks began in Paris last May, more than 10,000 young Americans have been killed.

The President's meeting in California last week with Ellsworth Bunker, the ambassador to Saigon, and General Andrew Goodpaster, deputy chief of U.S. forces in Viet Nam, may be only one of a series of crucial meetings aimed at new moves toward peace (see THE WORLD). "This is like any other delicate operation," says a top Nixon aide. "The public doesn't have to know what the strategy is. The last Administration made the terrible mistake of announcing what it was going to do. Why should we tell the other side what our negotiating position is?"

Still, the nation's discontent with the war will not be suspended indefinitely. The key question is, how long a moratorium does the President have? Nixon's own perhaps over-optimistic estimate: about six months.

Reticent Voices. The striking fact is that in a time of intolerance and acrimony, so many have been silent since Inauguration Day. Antiwar posters have not disappeared from the campuses. But the young and the militant have kept campus rebellions going more to support their own causes than to protest Viet Nam. Senate doves have not lost their voices, but they have been reticent. The presidential critic has for the moment become rather rare. That situation is likely to change over the ABM issue. But for the present, if Nixon has excited only a few, he has angered perhaps even fewer. Arthur Schlesinger complained that "no new President in memory has made so little effort in his first weeks in office to define his purposes," but many liberals, including charter Nixon-haters, are finding that they can live with the man surprisingly well.

"Do you, too, commence to feel the faint embarrassment of becoming comfortable with Richard Nixon?" asked Columnist Murray Kempton. San Francisco Folk Philosopher Eric Hoffer, who says that he was totally against Nixon before November, now recants. "The man is a total surprise," says Hoffer. "It's wonderful that a man who is so denigrated turns out to be so good. I glory in it." Few other observers share Hoffer's extravagant enthusiasm, but TIME correspondents around the country find that many others who voted for Hubert Humphrey also find merit--if only grudgingly--in the Republican President.

Traveling around Virginia and Pennsylvania last week, White House Correspondent Simmons Fentress found that most people give Nixon good, if not spectacularly high marks on his first 60 days. At the same time, the President has made almost no headway at all in converting the young and the blacks, who still view him skeptically. Nor has the Administration squarely met any of the problems that dominated the nation in the campaign--crime, disorders, inflation.

Touching as some of the comments from liberals are, they cannot equal in sheer poignancy the anguish of some conservatives who are learning that Nixon is not the man they thought he was. James Jackson Kilpatrick, a conservative Southern journalist, took a dark look at some of Nixon's appointments in the right-wing newsletter Human Events. "Pat Moynihan's affable face rises like a moon over urban affairs," he wrote, and declared that conservatives had been waiting in vain for a few scraps from the Administration. "Throw us a bone, Mr. President!" he begged.

Harmony at the Keyboard. Determined to shuck his old reputation as a combative campaigner, Nixon has gone out of his way to appease the opposition party. He stopped off in Independence, Mo., to present Harry Truman with his old White House piano for the Truman Library. Both men shook hands and smiled as if they could not remember that they had traded some of the bitterest personal exchanges in modern American politics.* When Truman, now 84, demurred at a suggestion that he try the old Steinwav, Nixon sat down and affably pounded out the Missouri Waltz in the key of G. Later, in Southern California, Nixon considered sites for his own library, spending the weekend in a picturesque oceanfront house at San Clemente, 50 miles south of Los Angeles, that he is thinking of buying for a summer White House.

For all his harsh talk about campus unrest, Nixon was unexpectedly mild in his statement on college disturbances released last week. At his direction, Secretary Finch merely dispatched, a letter to college administrators, pointing out that there is in existence a statute that cuts off federal aid to demonstrators who have been convicted of breaking the law. Given the strong current of public feeling against the demonstrators, the President could probably have done little less. He could, however, have done a great deal more, and those who hoped for a more repressive policy would undoubtedly be disappointed. The student message is, in fact, a paradigm of the Nixon style as so far revealed. The rhetoric is pitched to the right by condemning violence (but at the same time the message calls for reform). The action --or lack of action--is pitched to the middle and to the left.

In the opinion of Historian Sidney Hyman (The Politics of Consensus), Nixon's new role as a conciliator is another example of the "politics of reverse images," which changes many men who enter the White House. F.D.R., the aristocrat, became known, for example, as the man of the people. Dwight Eisenhower, the general, became the peacemaker. Richard Nixon, the abrasive partisan, has--so far anyway--been neither abrasive nor partisan. Though it is too early to speculate whether Nixon will be a good or bad President--it is probably impossible to be a mediocre President today--it is not too early to speculate, based on even such limited clues, what type of President he will be.

Historians sometimes divide the Presidents into three categories under the names of the three archetypical Chief Executives. James Buchanan, Lincoln's predecessor, was the formalist who administered but did not lead the country. Lincoln was the heroic leader whose stewardship was passionate, argumentative and highly political. Grover Cleveland was a mixture of the two, not moving forward at a rapid rate, but not stepping very far backward either, expending just enough energy, in Hyman's words, "to maintain the existing kinetic equilibrium."

Following Cleveland. The new President will not follow Buchanan; he is too energetic and committed for that. At the same time, he seems temperamentally incapable of the high-key style of a Lincoln or a Franklin Roosevelt, whose presidency, as Historian Clinton Rossiter notes, was characterized by "his airy eagerness to meet the age head-on." Instead, Nixon seems to view his office much as Cleveland did, and will probably work to push the country in the direction that he thinks it ought to go--with his foot poised between the brake and the accelerator.

Both Cleveland and Eisenhower, however, presided over what Nixon called a "simpler past." Whether the Cleveland concept will work in the complicated present will not be clear for many months, perhaps not until Jan. 20, 1973. By then, there may even be a fourth approach to the presidency, a distinctively Nixonian philosophy. The President has already surprised many people. "I knew, or thought I knew, Nixon in the 1950s," says Rossiter, whose The American Presidency has become a standard college text. "I thought I knew him in 1962; I thought I knew him during the last campaign. But now I'm not so sure I know him. I don't think anyone has a clear idea of what Nixon's going to do on any issue." The office is malleable, and Nixon has many choices. There is only one certainty. He does not have unlimited time in which to make his decisions and define his--and the country's--aims.

* As Vice President, Nixon used to refer to the "Truman-Acheson-Stevenson gang," and described all three as "traitors to the high principles" of the Democratic Party. Truman at the same time was widely quoted as calling Nixon "an s.o.b." He denied saying it, however. "I would never call him that," observed the former President. "After all, he claims to be a self-made man."

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